Priorities by Purpose

Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering

Inspiring Innovation

Engineers are inventors. They dream and design. They create and build.

Darlene Shiley established the Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering in honor of her husband, Donald, who founded Shiley Laboratory in his garage and went on to invent the tilting disc artificial heart valve, responsible for saving some 400,000 lives.

USD embraces the spirit of innovation that thrives in a garage, where so many inventors and entrepreneurs have done groundbreaking work.

As part of Leading Change: The Campaign for USD, the Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering will build a Bioengineering Garage, a Sustainability Garage and a Cyber Security Studio. The campaign offers an opportunity to reimagine the curriculum so a thermodynamics course won’t just teach students how to use heat, but will inspire them to create cooking stoves or energy systems that change lives in developing countries.

That’s what we’re proud to call Changemaker engineering.

To support USD Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering, please contactElisa Lurkis | (619) 260-7913